Posts Tagged ‘average state employee compensation package’

Democrats love to play Marxist class warfare: the rich against the poor.

But there’s another division of “class” that Democrats don’t want you to know about: the elitist government class against the lowly private sector working class. Democrats love the former, and to hell with the latter.

The average state employee compensation package costs approximately $93,039. Inflation-adjusted wages and benefits have increased 25 percent since fiscal 1999. The figures include the value of all benefits from state-paid retirement contributions to dry cleaning allowances.

The largest cost increases came from retirement benefits (which increased from $309 million in fiscal 1999 to $772 million in fiscal 2008) and health insurance (which increased from $273 million in fiscal 1999 to $554 million in fiscal 1999).

The wages and benefits of Michigan’s over 50,000 state employees cost taxpayers $4.7 billion in fiscal 2008. This is up from $3.2 billion in fiscal 1999, despite the state now employing 15 percent fewer workers.

This isn’t just going on in Michigan. It’s going on all over the country. But in particular, it’s going on in states that have had Democrat super-majorities for a generation. Places like Michigan and California:

Public employee pensions under pressureState and local leaders see the growing cost as a threat to California’s fiscal well-being. Efforts to reduce benefits are setting up a collision course with public employee unions.

Evan Halper and Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times
April 23, 2010

Reporting from Sacramento
— Across California, state and local leaders are moving to confront the cost of public employee retirement packages — an escalating financial burden that threatens to choke off funding for other government services.

Legislation now being debated in Sacramento would curtail pension benefits to future state employees. Elsewhere, city and county governments are looking at a variety of measures, including raising property taxes to cover shortfalls and reducing payments to retirement funds.

On Thursday, pension consultant Girard Miller told California’s Little Hoover Commission that state and local governments have $325 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, which he said amounts to $22,000 for every working adult in the Golden State.

“In California we had the Internet bubble, we had the housing bubble, and I see in the very near future the public pension bubble,” Gov. Schwarzenegger said this week. Confronting the pension crisis, he said, should be the state’s No. 1 policy priority.

If the problem is not addressed, the burden for funding government employee pensions would fall to the state’s taxpayers. Many elected officials are advocating a reduction in benefits mostly for new hires to stave off tax hikes — setting up a collision course with the state’s powerful public employee unions.

That’s right, private sector California workers. Government union employees have amassed benefits that will cost $22,000 EACH to pay for them. Let me just put a slave collar on each of you and say, “From now on, your name is Toby… Toby1… Toby2… Toby3…”

Now worry. Let’s just raise Californian’s taxes by $325 billion to pay for those government worker pensions which dwarf everybody else’s. That’s what prolls are for, right? We have to toil and labor to support our commissar betters. That’s what communists and Democrats want, right?

You’re damn right that’s right.

How are the government union employees handling this revolt of the prolls?

Not very well. The loathsome little demon who has replaced their souls is angry:

Earlier this week, labor leaders bused in supporters to protest for higher taxes in Springfield, Illinois.

Of course, by “bused in supporters,” I literally meant bused in supporters! Grassroots, baby!

Thousands of protesters bused down by labor unions and social service advocates rallied at the Capitol today in an attempt to pressure state lawmakers into raising the income tax to avoid more budget cuts.

A spokesman for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White estimated the rally crowd at 15,000, with more than 12,000 marching around the building. That would appear to make it the largest Capitol protest since the Equal Rights Amendment crowds a quarter-century ago.

Bus after bus pulled up on streets surrounding the Capitol complex and dumped sign-waving protesters clad in purple, green, red and blue shirts that represented a show of strength from a variety of public employee unions and dozens of groups that formed what they named the “Responsible Budget Coalition.”

“Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes!” they chanted, lined up shoulder to shoulder for a few hundred yards stretching a street in front of the Capitol.
….
She said she hopped on a charter bus this morning to Springfield “to raise hell, basically.”

These people don’t want THEIR taxes raised. They want to “raise the hell” out of YOUR taxes to keep the benefits that are WAAAAAAAAYYYY dramatically superior to the private sector prolls going.

Democrat government union employees deserve better. You and your children deserve to suck it up and pay for their massive wage-and-benefit packages that dwarf anything private sector employees are getting for similar work. And if you don’t like it, they will bus in union headbusters from all over the country to get Democrat politicians to do their bidding.

It’s time to vote the Democrats out, put conservatives in charge, and let them go to work on the REAL “class warfare” of liberal Democrat special interests.

When the rich get rich, at least they have the basic decency to pay for themselves. The liberal Democrat union government sector employee have you pay for absolutely everything – and continues to demand that you keep paying massive benefits to him or her until the day he or she dies.